I just had a conversation with someone who has worked on a Featured Article or two in Wikipedia. They felt that even though they know Wikipedia possesses some unpleasant cult-like characteristics, they are still helping the world by at least getting some topics up to Featured Article status, because then the articles will be "more stable" and "less edited".

I responded:



Not that I think I'm on to something new here, as this has been said many times, many ways (pardon me, Mel Torme), but I just wanted to put down in a public space my moment of clarity on the issue.

I think it was a scene in The Grifters — I've got the DVD somewhere, so I'll check in a sec — that perfectly illustrates The Altruist Con (TAC).

Jon

All sorts of cons are based on altruism, taking advantage of the charitable impulse. Why else would Jimbo keep calling the operation a "charity"? Wikipedia is especially cheeky in this regard, because they try to convince people that merely "making edits" is a form of charity. I've never understood why the media lets them get away with it to the extent that they do, unless it's just never occurred to them to call them on it.

IMO, the word for this is probably pernicious. Or else maybe "two-faced"... With one face, they're telling people that their contributions, and their assistance in "fixing problems," are a form of charity. And with another, they're using the gaming aspects of their wide-open system to attract "vandals" and "POV pushers" who provide the impetus for that activity. People on both sides of the equation are being conned, especially the vandals. At least the altruists probably have nothing better to do, or else they can't afford to give real money to people who need actual charity.

There are many red links in the major works section of the Jim Thompson article. Perhaps there's some sort of protective effect to be gained by reading his books?

There are multiple types of, and motivations for, what Wikipedians call "vandalism" (in itself another misuse of terminology, though there probably isn't a proper real-world term for what it actually is). Doing it "just for laughs" is a big one, but hardly the only one. In many cases the article becomes a surrogate for the thing itself, and blanking the page is an expression of the destructive impulse, while inserting various things (like "ERIC IS A FAG") is an expression of the desire to weaken or belittle, and thereby dominate and control, the thing being described.

If we assume (OK, theorize) that over time, the "just for laughs" crowd will give up (most jokes get old after a while, even for kids), but that the surrogation crowd (whose enjoyment is not necessarily based on humor value) will reflect Wikipedia's continued dominance of search-engine results, then how are the surrogationists being conned? Simply put, the fact that they choose Wikipedia for their surrogation needs simply feeds the system what it needs - attention, by which self-importance slowly becomes real importance.

The thing is, we've seen that Wikipedia and the non-specialist media types who report on it are willing to disingenuously push and/or blindly accept the idea that one account = one person - even though this is obviously absurd on its face - and even worse, that edits = participation, which is a grossly irresponsible assumption no matter how you slice it. In other words, people like Erik Moeller and Eric Zachte will happily look at edit counts and other such statistics and say, "look at these pretty graphs, they show that contributions are holding steady, so everything is just fine," when a huge portion of those contributors are "socks," "SPAs" and "vandals," and the contributions themselves are what their own people would call "vandalism," "vanity-cruft," and "POV pushing" - not to mention the reverts that follow those things (and also not to mention other trivial edits like categorizations, template-spamming, list-mongering, mass-stubbings, and so on - and that's just in "mainspace").

The surrogationists, even though they are what Wikipedia calls "vandals," are buying into the idea of Wikipedia-as-reality-mirror just as much as the "constructive" editors, if not more so, and in so doing they're making Wikipedia the "surrogate-host of choice" for a society that's well on its way to giving up on real protest, and real democratic participation, in favor of sitting alone in front of a computer and anonymously posting to some easily-ignored blog, or easily-reverted wiki article. This might help explain a few things about Wikipedia's acceptance among the ruling power elites - the more surrogates the better as far as they're concerned, and the best surrogates of all are the ones that are easily destroyed and then put back again as if nothing had happened. From their perspective, Wikipedia exists to absorb the destructive impulses of common people who, as you say, might otherwise be out in the real world, causing real damage.

This is all going into the book, eventually...

Oh well, Greg, I thought your title said it all — but the content-fixated snow-blinded types just never seem to get the point. And my meager capacity for ORiginality is too rapidly exhausted with trying to think up fitting titles for their clueless ravels, so what can you do?

Jon

There's that memory thing again. The scene I had in mind was actually from Confidence (Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz, Dustin Hoffman, Paul Giamatti).

I had even described it a couple of years ago in this post.

Jon

They never will, because there is always a fresh supply of juveniles who haven't gotten their first edit/vandalism in. There's also the "writing on the bathroom wall" quality of a lot of the vandalism.

The main scene I recall from that fine film was The Lady Or The Loot.
I wonder how Jimbeau would have handled that scenario?
My guess is he would take the loot, then give it to the lady in return for a Moscow-style massage.

Not that I find anything wrong with loving loot or ladies. What matters is how you acquire them, and what you do with them afterwards.